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outlawpoet comments on Mandatory Secret Identities - Less Wrong
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No.
You're wasting huge amounts of optimization power, here, in two different ways. Firstly, you're saying that no one should focus his efforts on becoming a good rationality instructor, that any work he does on that is entirely meaningless unless he is at least as good at something else. Secondly, you're saying that no one should focus his efforts on instructing people in rationality, that they should spend most of their time on whatever other thing it is that makes them impressive. If you have someone who is naturally better at instructing people in rationality than in anything else, you are wasting most of the surplus you could have gained from him in these two ways.
I'm sympathetic to your concern, but surely there must be a way we can avoid throwing out the baby with the bathwater?
I agree with this comment vociferously.
The upper bound isn't a terrible idea, but it would, for example, knock E.T. Jaynes out of the running as a desirable rationality instructor, as the only unrelated competent activity I can find for him is the Jaynes-Cumming Model of atomic evolution, which I have absolutely zero knowledge of.
Dude, what on Earth are you talking about. E. T. Jaynes was a Big Damn Polymath. I seem to also recall that in his later years he was well-paid for teaching oil companies how to predict where to drill, though that's not mentioned in the biography (and wouldn't rank as one of his most significant accomplishments anyway).
Not something I was aware of, but good to know.
I wasn't aware of anything from before his career as an academic, 1982-onward. His wikipedia article doesn't mention anything but the atom thing. But he certainly set out to be a Professor of rationality-topics.
Regardless of the merits of E. T. Jaynes, we should place the activity of a rationality instructor in a separate mental bucket than a rationality theoretician. I would say that making a significant original intellectual advance counts as a real accomplishment.